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Brand Community Strategy of Lululemon:
The Relation Between Brand Ambassador’s Trust and Customer
Engagement
Zichen Qian1, *, †Jamin Zou2, *, †
1 University of Toronto Scarborough, University of Toronto, Toronto, M1C 1A4, Canada
2 The Business Scholl(Formerly Cass), City, University of London, London, EC1V 0HB, United Kingdom
*Corresponding author. Email:guanghua.ren@gecacdemy.cn
†These authors contributed equally.
ABSTRACT
In lululemon’s success of customer engagement of their brand community, ambassador’s trust is assumed to be a
significant factor. This research aims to discuss how would brand ambassador’s trust reflects on the customer
engagement level of its offline brand community, taking customers who engage in lululemon’s offline brand
community in North America as a research subject by reviewing the customer engagement theory. This study focuses
on using the concepts of trust and customer engagement to theoretically demonstrate the relationship between trust
and customer engagement with the notion that trust will arise in the presence of uncertainty and risk aversion. The
relationship between trust and customer engagement with the notion that trust will arise in the presence of uncertainty
and risk aversion. From the perspective of customer engagement, five factors that may impact the level of customer
engagement are analyzed and compared. A questionnaire was designed by asking questions about the ambassador of
Lululemon. Finally, regression analysis had been used to analyze the data in excel. The main result of this paper
showed that ambassadorial characteristics, trust, and emotional engagement have a significant impact on the level of
engagement. In addition, trust having the most prominent impact on the level of engagement. This research
contributes to compensate for the gap and concentrate on the offline brand community, and the limitation will also be
discussed in the following context.
Keywords: Brand Ambassador, Brand Community, Lululemon, Trust, Customer Engagement
1. INTRODUCTION
Various athletic brands hold brand community as a
tool for building customer engagement to create and
sustain emotional connections between the customers
and the brand [1]. Especially in North America, where
customers are used to taking the product as a symbol to
claim their own lifestyle and care more about the brand
manifesto, diverse brand community events as customer
engagement, defined as the intensity of an individual’s
participation in organizational activities, are developed
to maintain customer loyalty from competitors [2].
Compare to customers from other countries, customers
in North America are supposed to hold higher
participating willingness to brand community events
because of the common sense establishment of
considering events as a component of consuming
service and a space for social activity. This makes
athletic brand highlights the value of customer
engagement of the brand community in the North
America market to attract potential customers and
employs brand ambassadors strategically to set brand
image and foster customer engagement as an
individual’s life habit. As a brand featured by its brand
community culture, Lululemon shows a successful
strategy setting in this area.
Lululemon Athletica is a popular athletic apparel
brand founded in 1998, Vancouver, particularly featured
in yoga-inspired apparel and accessories. They advocate
a brand image of a healthy lifestyle and create “living
the sweatlife” as their core business mindset, which
ignites a community of people through sweat, grows and
connection, with middle-class women as their main
customer group and members of the brand community.
As recorded, till the end of 2020, lululemon operated
521 stores in 17 countries across the globe, not only for
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Proceedings of the 2021 3rd International Conference on Economic Management and
Cultural Industry (ICEMCI 2021)
Copyright © 2021 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press International B.V.
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selling products but also as a meeting place for customer
engagement, which gives them a direct connection to
customer’s needs and feedback [3]. Calvin McDonald,
lululemon’s chief executive officer, indicates that they
believe offline flagship store as a meeting place for
offline brand community, is a valuable tool to build
brand awareness of healthy lifestyle and maintain
customer loyalty from its competitors [3]. For lululemon,
they take the brand community as a tool to increase
brand-customer engagement and develop customer
loyalty. Differs from an athletic brand like Nike’s
designing Nike by you event, allowing their loyal
customers to design their own pair of Nike sneakers,
lululemon builds their offline brand community for free
yoga training, facing both their premium customers and
customers interested in the brand. Each year lululemon
host above 4,000 events worldwide, including their
annual 2-day Sweatlife Festival, free yoga classes,
weekly held inspiring talks at their stores, and so on [4].
Through this strategy, lululemon emphasized the brand
image of a healthy lifestyle instead of a fashion icon [5].
Thus, this result indicates that the customer engagement
of lululemon’s offline brand community has a positive
and intensive correlation with the success of their brand
community strategy. Besides, lululemon has an
ambassador program with more than 2000 localized
athletes and leaders in fitness, nutrition, and business [4].
Instead of inviting athletic celebrities like Cristiano
Ronaldo (who represents the brand ambassador of Nike)
as the brand ambassador, lululemon uses a voluntarily
introduced system to encourage their loyal customers.
The latter approve their brand image and live a healthy
lifestyle which fits their brand manifesto to become
their brand ambassadors. In addition, they hire local
yoga teachers, whose character is supposed to deliver
more feeling of trust in the scene of training, as their
brand ambassadors to teach the class in their brand
community, as an important component of their brand
community strategy. Trust is important because it acts
as a relational governance mechanism assuring partner
reciprocity [6].
Amounts of researches study the customer
engagement strategy of lululemon and how trust affects
social media brand community establishment, which
emphasizes the value of analysis on the relationship
between trust and the customer engagement of
lululemon’s brand community. While most researchers
focus on the impacts of trust on online social media
content, studies about effects on an offline brand
community still meet a gap. Therefore, the research will
contribute to the research gap of offline brand
community and explore the effect of lululemon’s
ambassador’s trust on its offline brand community's
customer engagement. Because of the outbreak of
COVID19 and the self-isolation policy, customer
engagement of lululemon’s offline brand community
met am impressive stagnation. Study on their customer
engagement during the pandemic would be period-
biased and lose the meaning of generalization and
accessibility. Before the pandemic, the brand
community engagement situation would be taken as the
research background, with lululemon’s main market,
North America market as the sample. In brief, the key
question of the research is: how would brand
ambassador’s trust reflects on customer engagement of
its offline brand community?, taking the customer
engagement of their brand community in the North
America Market before the outbreak of COVID19 as the
research background. lululemon's customers who
engage in its brand community activities in North
America would be taken as the research subject.
It is conjectured that a positive relation between
lululemon’s ambassador’s trust and customer
engagement of their brand community would be argued.
To examine the conjecture, the research would first go
through a literature review to introduce the background
of theories. In the methodology part, a survey targeted
research subject would be used to analyze the linear
correlation between trust as an independent variable and
customer engagement of brand community as the
dependent variable to test the relationship. The
discussion part would be focused on the following
questions: a) What does the respondent results indicate,
b) How is the result presented in lululemon’s issue,
particularly how they decide the image of their brand
ambassadors and how the brand ambassador’s trust
affect customer engagement of the brand community
and c) the limitation of the research.
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 Brand ambassador
Brand ambassadors are partners of the brand and an
extension of the brand and an inspiration for guests.
Nowadays, it is common for brands to choose brand
ambassadors that match their brand image, and many
brands are aware of the brand value and commercial
benefits that brand ambassadors can bring. In an article
published in 2012, Pamela highlighted the importance
of brand ambassadors in spreading brand culture and
building a psychological connection with consumers [7].
But Louie and Obermiller discovered the difficulties of
choosing the right brand ambassador back in 2002 and
demonstrated the potential risks to brands of choosing
the inappropriate ambassador [8]. As a result, many
brands have their own criteria for choosing ambassadors.
2.2 Trust
Where trust can be used, exchanges between people
are much more efficient. The establishment of trust has
helped many transactions to be completed without the
use of formal contracts while at the same time reducing
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the need for the truster to regulate the trust. Thus, trust
plays an important role in interpersonal relationships.
Kramer et al., in their 1998 study, argued that trust is a
state of mind that relies on the trusted person even when
one is aware that the other person's behaviour may cause
one harm [9]. Many trust experts share this statement. It
also laid the foundation stone for subsequent scholarly
research on trust. Apart from this feature, scholars
diverge on other characteristics of trust. Hill and O'Hara
in 2006 mentioned that many scholars view trust from a
behavioural perspective, and it is undeniable that trust
does have behavioural implications [10]. Trust largely
influences people's choice of partners and the degree to
which they pay attention to partners. However, some
scholars prefer to understand trust from a cognitive
perspective, and Russell Hardin in 2002 supports this
claim and argues that knowledge, beliefs, etc., can be
used to assess trust [11]. In Good's view in 2000, trust is
predicted by the truster of the trustee's behaviour, which
the truster firmly believes. Good believes that because
the truster shares the trustee's values, the trustee will
consider the trusters’ welfare into behaviour and
decisions and will behave in the way the truster expects
[12]. The research conducted by Dunn in 2000 tends to
believe that a person will assess trust in terms of internal
criteria such as honesty, competence, reliability, and
loyalty [13].
Scholars in studies related to trust have also
uncovered the values associated with trust. Firstly, trust
can facilitate cooperation between parties. Many
scholars generally agree that trust is voluntary and
purposeful and that the purpose of the trust is to
maintain good cooperation for the benefit of both parties;
whether or not people trust each other may determine
how they behave when they perceive that the behaviour
of others may be detrimental to their own interests or
when they face greater risk in making decisions.
Empirical research by Morgan and Hunt in 1994
showed that trust could facilitate cooperation between
parties to a transaction [14]. Secondly, trust can reduce
transaction costs. In the fields of sociology,
organisational behaviour, and marketing, there is much
literature on how trust can reduce transaction costs. In
low trust societies, transaction costs are high due to the
need for cumbersome contracts, monitoring, and legal
instruments to ensure that exchanges take place properly;
in contrast, in high trust societies, perceived risk is low,
and the need for control mechanisms is reduced,
effectively reducing transaction costs. Thirdly, trust can
influence marketing effectiveness. In 2000, Singh and
Sirdeshmukh argued that trust brings relational benefits
to customers and thus positively impacts customer
satisfaction [15]. 1998, Bowen and Shoemaker further
argued that customers are willing to give positive word-
of-mouth to companies they trust and will buy services
from these companies again in the future [16].
The generation of trust in people's daily lives can be
summarised as risk aversion and uncertainty reduction.
Barbalet argued in 2009 that trust becomes particularly
important in situations where there is uncertainty about
the future [17]. Whereas people often feel anxious and
uneasy when attempting to approach or enter a field of
great uncertainty, the emergence of trust, particularly in
someone with relevant expertise, reduces anxiety and
unease and allows individuals to approach uncertainty
without certain knowledge. Individual partial
knowledge, provisional assessments of probable events
and assumptions can all be seen as measures people may
take in an uncertain environment. Still, because of the
mismatch between forms of knowledge and the
challenge of expertise to the public, people tend to trust
those with expertise and thus avoid most risks. For
example, many companies hire university professors or
researchers as consultants, and Camporesi et al., in their
2017 study, confirmed the link between risk aversion
and trust and highlighted the role of expertise as a
mediator [18].
2.3 Customer engagement
The concept of engagement emerged in the field of
marketing in 2009, after being introduced by academics
in the fields of organisational behaviour and psychology.
Depending on the definition of engagement in different
fields, engagement can be understood in three main
dimensions. The first is the behavioural perspective,
proposed by Doorn et al. in 2010, which refers to the
behavioural interaction between a consumer and a
company or brand [19]. This concept is mentioned and
recognised in Jaakkola and Alexander's study in 2014
[20]. In addition, Bordie et al. add a psychological
understanding of engagement in their 2011 study, where
they argue that behaviour and psychology occur
together during consumer-brand interactions [21]. He
states that engagement is " a state of mind that emerges
in a focal service relationship by virtue of an interactive,
co-created customer experience with the focal brand."
The psychological state of the consumer during
engagement is a multidimensional construct consisting
of cognitive and emotional dimensions. Bowden, in
2009 considered the inclusion of psychological
processes in consumer engagement into the concept, by
referring to the psychological processes of consumers in
engagement, it is possible to demonstrate the
mechanisms at work for new consumers to generate
brand loyalty and for existing customers to maintain
brand loyalty [22]. Overall, considering engagement as
a multidimensional structure is one of the most widely
accepted doctrines by scholars. This study will also
follow the cognitive, emotional, and behavioural
dimensions to understand the psychological state of
consumers during their interactions with brand
ambassadors.
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2.4 Trust and Consumer Engagement
Consumer engagement can be analysed from two
perspectives, a sense of meaningfulness and a sense of
safety. This term was coined by Kahn in 1990, who
argued that enhancing consumers' sense of
meaningfulness and safety during interactions can
enhance engagement cognitively, emotionally, and
behaviourally [23]. Lee and Ok in 2015 noted that a
sense of meaningfulness refers to the feeling that
participants are valued and rewarded for their efforts in
the process [24]. While Rich et al. in 2010 stated that a
sense of safety emerges when consumers are in a non-
threatening and predictable environment [25]. Gefen et
al. in 2003 elaborated that the presence of trust leads
consumers to believe that the trusted person is ethical
and, therefore, the trusted person's behaviour is based on
ethical and appropriate social manner [26]. Thus, when
trust is established between members and ambassadors,
members tend to believe that their effort will be
perceived, valued by the ambassador, and even
rewarded. Under these conditions, the demand for
members to be needed and rewarded increases. Chan et
al. 2014 discuss the importance of feeling needed and
rewarded to the meaning of engagement [27]. In
addition, based on the previously mentioned system-
based trust, the information brought by the trusted
person is perceived as accurate and valid by the trustor,
who believes that their personal knowledge will be
mentioned to be enhanced in the process. Thus, the
enhancement of personal knowledge is also part of the
meaningfulness of engagement.
From the perspective of safety, Mcknight et al. in
2002 refer to uncertainty and risk caused by information
asymmetry [28]. Thus, the knowledge of the trusted
person can help the trustor to reduce uncertainty and
risk. Trust can help trustees increase their security by
reducing uncertainty and risk when they are exposed to
unfamiliar territory in a brand community. We can
hypothesize that: brand community members' trust in
ambassadors positively affects customer engagement.
3. METHODOLOGY
3.1 Research Design
The research tends to use the survey as a data
collection method, taking lululemon’s customers in the
North America Market. They attend their brand
community events before the outbreak of COVID19, as
a sample. One hundred respondent results as a basic
sample quantity are expected to be received for the
research data. According to previous research, a 20%
loss of unusable data needs to be taken into account.
Using quantitative analysis is supposed to make the
result more objective and improve the reference value of
the research.
3.2 Data Collection
To reach available data indicating the relation
between ambassador’s trust and the brand community’s
customer engagement, a 24-question investigation is
designed. The investigation comprises four parts: 1)
Basic Information, 2) Ambassador, 3) Trust and 4)
Customer Engagement. The basic information part is
intended to position the customer group who prefer to
attend lululemon’s brand community. As the second
part, “Ambassador” is going to examine customers’
understanding of brand ambassador to figure out what
message could the brand deliver to their customers
through the image of their brand ambassador, so that
question like “what values do you see in brand
ambassador” would be included. In the last two parts,
the role of ambassador’s trust plays in the process of
brand community engagement, and the results of
changing in customer engagement would be tested to
figure out the relation between ambassador’s trust as
factor x and customer engagement of brand community
as factor y. Besides, the model of separating impacts on
customer engagement into emotional, behavioral, and
cognitive engagement would be applied to make the
impacts on customer engagement more specific. Data
regression would be used as the data analysing tool to
build a relation between trust as an independent variable
and customer engagement of lululemon’s brand
community as the dependent variable.
A total of 105 responses were received from
respondents who had purchased Lululemon products
and had participated in Lululemon brand community
activities. 57.1% of the 105 respondents were female,
while 42.9% were male. 42.9% of the respondents were
aged 18-25, 28.6% were aged 26-30, 10.5% were aged
31-40 and 15.2% were aged 41-50. The remaining
proportion of respondents was greater than 51 years old.
In terms of income level, the largest proportion of
respondents earned between 2001-3500$ per month,
followed by 36.2% and 33.3% of respondents earning
501-2000$ per month, respectively. Out of the 105
responses, 93.9% of the respondents exercise regularly.
4. RESULT
Based on the 105 valid responses collected,
regression analysis was used to determine the
quantitative interdependence of the multiple variables
(see Table 1,2,3).
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Table 1. Regression Statistic
SUMMARY OUTPUT
Multiple R 0.79447154
R Square 0.631185027*
Adjusted R Square 0.611975914
Standard Error 0.415201607
Observations 102
Table 2. ANOVA
df SS MS F Significance F
Regression 5 28.32288108 5.664576216 32.85862404 2.13672E-19
Residual 96 16.54966794 0.172392374
Total 101 44.87254902
Table 3. Regression Parameter
Coefficients Standard Error t Stat P-value
y=Engage level -0.645117988 0.191264006 -3.372918935 0.001073623
Characteristic 0.159601526 0.038230507 4.174716483 0.000065628**
Trust 1.666666667 0.634230931 2.627854597 0.010004416**
Emotion -0.812491169 0.808359028 -1.005111764 0.003635580**
Behavior -1.22829E-14 0.694765175 -1.76791E-14 1.000000000**
Cognitive 0.725448636 0.864132787 0.839510602 0.403268620**
*Significant at the 0.5 probability test
**Significant at the 0.05 probability test
According to Table 1, where Multiple R represents
the correlation between two variables, generally
between -1 and 1. The closer the value of Multiple R is
to -1, the higher the negative correlation is, and vice
versa. R square is the square of multiple R, usually
between 0 and 1, and the larger the value, the better the
fit of the regression model to the actual data. The R
square in Table 1 is 0.63118503, greater than 50%,
indicating a good fit between the data and the model.
Table 3 is a table of regression parameters, and the
p-value helps to prove the existence of a relationship
between characteristics, trust, emotion, behaviour,
cognitive, and engagement level. The p-value of each
independent variable can be used to test the null
hypothesis that the variable is not correlated with the
dependent variable. No correlation means that there is
no association between the two variables. When the p-
value is less than the significance level, it indicates that
the null hypothesis is rejected. In comparison, a p-value
larger than the significance level indicates that the null
hypothesis is accepted. Based on the p-value of each
variable in Table 1, it can be concluded that the p-value
of behavior and cognitive are greater than the
significance level, and the null hypothesis is accepted.
The null hypothesis is rejected because the p-value of
characteristic, trust, and emotion is less than 0.05.
Therefore, only the relationship between characteristic,
trust, emotion, and y can be proved significant. The
coefficients in the first column correspond to the
regression coefficients of the model. The coefficient can
be used to test the strength of the linear relationship
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between the independent and dependent variables, with
larger values representing a stronger linear relationship.
In Table 1, only the coefficients of characteristic and
trust are greater than 0, and the coefficients of emotion
are negative, thus indicating that the relationship
between the two variables is negatively correlated under
this data collection. The coefficient of Trust is 1.6667,
which has the strongest linear correlation with
engagement level. This is followed by characteristics.
5. DISCUSSION
This study offers two contributions to studying the
effect of brand ambassador’s trust on customer
engagement. First, it provides conceptual insights into
how customer understands the role of brand ambassador
and what factors decide ambassador’s trust, as the basis
of building relationships between brand ambassador and
customer. Data collected by the survey reveals that 33%
of respondents consider spreading the brand culture as
the value of brand ambassador and 27.4% of
respondents consider representing the brand image as
the value. Ability and personality are taken as two major
factors when these respondents decide to trust, which
indicates that brand ambassador is not only an image of
beauty to exhibit products, but also a representative
closely associated with the brand culture and manifesto.
This illustrates that recent customers tend to care more
about what the brand of the product stands for rather
than the product itself, more about the ability rather than
enjoyable visibility, indicating the significance of the
characteristics of a brand ambassador. Second, the result
of the research approves the hypothesis that
ambassador’s trust is supposed to have a positive
relationship with customer engagement. This result fits
the theory that CE is an establishment of an emotional
connection between the brand and customers [2],
assuming that an ambassador’s trust could effectively
strengthen the connection and be a crucial factor
influencing the increase of customer engagement.
To apply the result of these studies on lululemon’s
brand community issue, lululemon takes professional
training ability and sense of appetency as two factors to
position the identity of their brand ambassador, and
employs local yoga trainers as their brand ambassador
to engage in the events of their brand community. With
these two factors related to trust according to the
contribution of the survey, lululemon can build strong
emotional connections between the brand ambassador,
as the representative of the brand image, and customers.
Through the ambassador’s trust, taking brand
community events is transferred into engaging
interactions with the brand ambassador as a specific
individual with emotional contact, making brand
community events an individual’s daily habit instead of
consumer behavior and increasing customer engagement
of the brand community.
This study found that trust had a positive impact on
consumer engagement and that the characteristics of
brand ambassadors had a significant impact on
consumer engagement. It was concluded that
consumers' trust in brand ambassadors led to an increase
in their engagement, measured in terms of the number
of times they engaged with the campaign. This study
reaffirms the relationship between trust and engagement
confirmed by Liu et al. in 2018 [29]. However, in
contrast to previous studies, the important influence of
security and meaningfulness in relation to customers on
customer engagement, as discussed by Kahn et al. in
1990, was not represented in this study [23]. Although
feelings of security and meaning are present in trusting
relationships, the current study did not consider either's
impact on client engagement in the questionnaire design.
Secondly, Kahn et al., in their 1990 study, used
cognition, emotion, and behavior as three aspects of
measuring consumer engagement. Still, this study used
these three variables as independent variables to observe
the relationship with the level of engagement [23]. And
the relationship between emotion and engagement was
found to be negative. Although studies by Barbalet in
2009 and Camprosei et al. in 2017 illustrate trust arising
in situations of uncertainty and risk avoidance as a way
of theoretically demonstrating that ambassadorial
characteristics lead to the existence of trust [17, 18].
This study, however, confirms the impact between
characteristics and trust separately and does not explore
the relationship between characteristics and consumer
engagement by using trust as a moderator.
6. CONCLUSION
This study examines the level of customer
engagement with Lululemon brand ambassadors in
Canada in the context of the widespread use of the
brand ambassador concept. To explore which
factors associated with brand ambassadors
influence the level of customer engagement, this
article conducts a literature review on three aspects
of brand ambassadors, trust, and customer
engagement, to draw out the important relationship
between trust and customer engagement from
previous research. The quantitative study collected
questionnaire responses and regression analysis
concluded that brand ambassador characteristics
and trust in brand ambassadors significantly impact
customer engagement, with trust having a stronger
impact on customer engagement. By summarizing
the theory and analyzing the data, we conclude that
customer trust in brand ambassadors is key to the
ability of Lululemon's brand community to be an
important customer engagement strategy for the
brand. The result is supposed to reveal the relation
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between ambassador’s trust and customer
engagement, providing a new view for companies
to set the identity or the image of brand
ambassador and target customer engagement. So
that companies could include ambassador’s trust
into consideration when deciding a customer
engagement strategy. Besides, the result verifies
the original assumption of the research to prove
that there is a positive relationship between brand
ambassador’s trust and customer engagement of
the offline community. It is considered to
compensate the research gap of offline
community’s reflection to trust and brand
ambassador.
However, since this study mainly focuses on
lululemon’s brand ambassador and customer
engagement of their brand community, taking
lululemon’s customers who attend their brand
community events before as the subject of the
survey, the research meets limitations in the
generality of application. The contribution of
lululemon’s customer group characteristics of
middle-class, well-educated women on customer
engagement is ignored during the research. Besides,
during the design of the survey, scale question
meets a lack of attention, and point system is used
to research the linear correlation between
ambassador’s trust as an independent variable and
customer engagement as the dependent variable.
Future study on the effects of ambassador’s trust
on different customer groups is expected.
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